Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter — A Review By Salvatore Pane

In 1989, my parents bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas. I was four years old and this was, unequivocally, the happiest moment of my entire life. This is not an uncommon story; the NES sold more than 61 million copies. But what’s always stayed with me is the durability of that memory. I can picture opening that Nintendo for the first time so vividly, and I’ll never forget the contours of the NES controller or the orange and gray gun that came with the system. Today, even as I’m beginning to forget the voices of dead relatives or friends, I can still hear the laughing dog in Duck Hunt. I can still hear the Moon level theme in Ducktales or the one-up sound effect in Super Mario Bros. 3. This is all to say that these games, these artificial worlds, meant something to me and have made an impression that has lasted for over twenty years. This is all to say that I am the ideal reader for Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

Bissell is a writer I’ve admired for a long time. He published a short story in Best American a few years back and his nonfiction is often touted as some of the best in the literary world. Earlier this year, The Guardian posted one of the essays from Extra Lives that detailed Bissell’s descent into a coke-fueled Grand Theft Auto IV addiction, and almost immediately his new book shot to the top of my MUST READ NOW list. Extra Lives does not disappoint. For decades, video game analysis has languished at two polar extremes. On one hand is the fan press, websites aimed at the extreme 18-49 male market like IGN and Gamespot. On the other hand is the turgid muck of critical theory represented by tomes like Persuasive Games and The Exploit. The former is akin to seeking literary discussion from Spike TV, and the later is so mind-numbingly dry you often forget they’re writing about digital ninjas that run around hacking sentries to pieces. Extra Lives changes all that. Without a doubt, this is the book people will recommend when asked for a text that takes video games seriously as a phenomenon, manifestation of digital culture, and even as an art form. And guess what? It’s actually readable!

The nine thematically linked essays included here run the gamut between designer profile pieces to serious analysis of imagery heavy games. The designer profile essays are some of the most accessible. Even if you know nothing about gaming, you can read these essays and catch a glimpse of the bizarre type of hybrid engineer/artists that are fueling an entertainment industry that generates more annual revenue than Hollywood. Calling these people eccentrics would be a compliment. Take for instance, the legendary Peter Molyneux, the brain behind the Fable series, who gives Bissell this choice quote when asked if games will one day have a Sistine Chapel equivalent:

If I were to draw on the wall what a computer-game character was just twenty years ago it would be made up of sixteen-by-sixteen dots– We’ve gone from that to daring to suggest we can represent the human face. And pretty much everything we’ve done, we’ve invented— There weren’t any books on this stuff– Painting the ceiling on the Sistine Chapel? No. We had to invent the paint– There is not another form of technology on this planet that has kept up with games. The game industry marches on in this way because it has this dream that, one day, it’s going to be real. We’re going to have real life. We’re going to have real characters. We’re going to have real drama. We’re going to change the world and entertain in a way that nothing else ever has before.

Holy shit! Are these guys insane or just geniuses? Bissell doesn’t tip his hat either way, letting readers come to their own conclusions. He even breaks down the nerdy engineer stereotype and shows us a whole host of unsuspected characters. The sports car driving, playboy designer, the tormented artist designer, the sci-fi novelist designer: Bissell includes them all, and most importantly, he never reduces them to geek stereotypes. He writes with empathy.

The other type of essay in the book—serious, thoughtful takes on some of the modern era’s most beloved games—works even if you’ve never played the games in question. The four major essays in the vein focus on Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Resident Evil and Bioshock. I’ll admit that I’ve only played the one game on that list released in the ’90’s, but I had absolutely no problem following along with Bissell’s examples or logic, and even found myself dying to get my hands on one of the newer games explained as “a gameworld exploration of the social consequences inherent within Ayn ‘s Objectivism.” This is light years ahead of the game reviews I remember reading years ago in GamePro, often written by people with names like Johnny Ballgame and Lawrence of Arcadia. Extra Lives is so unique because although Tom Bissell is unquestionably a fanboy, he does not view video games with the rosy-colored lens of the fanboy. He comes at games from a literary perspective, and that makes all the difference. Mark my words, Extra Lives will be heralded as a game changer for video game analysis in the same way that Andre Bazin’s texts impacted the world of film criticism.

Obviously, it’s no secret that I savored each and every page of Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives. Anyone with a background like mine—people who have racked up literally hundreds of hours controlling digital avatars—absolutely must read this book. Bissell writes with emotion and life; none of these essays are stuffy. But what about the more traditional readers, people who would never dream of actually spending a few minutes in the Mushroom Kingdom, let alone a few years? Extra Lives may be even more important for them. If Peter Molyneux is right, and we’re only a few decades away from a form of media that’s going to “change the world and entertain in a way that nothing else ever has before”, then this is the ground floor introductory course into the evolving landscape of digital culture. This is a required text for anyone interested in the way media is fundamentally altering the human being.